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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • I don’t know the exact date but it was a spring day a little over 20 years ago now. I was in my early 20s and spent a lot of my free time hiking, camping, etc. At that time I was really heavily into caving, especially vertical caving where we would use ropes, harnesses, etc to explore chasms.

    This particular day I was on a several day camping trip to a really popular area in a national park. In the night a big rainstorm came and everything flooded. I had been there several days with my friend and we didn’t get the memo about the storm coming and were curious why nobody else was camping there when it was usually packed that time of year.

    The next morning we awoke and this campground (on the banks of a river) was halfway underwater. We soon learned that our road out was also underwater so we were trapped at the campground. We had plenty of supplies as we had been there several days with intentions to explore caves, etc.

    Now from this campground there was a really popular hike through a canyon with stone arches, cool caves, waterfalls, etc that was normally packed. Since we had the place to ourselves we decided to do the hike. I should mention that this was quite dangerous as the first mile or so of the trail was now under 2+ feet of moving flood waters. We had wetsuits (for caving) and ropes so we geared up and braved the flood waters.

    Dear reader it felt like such an epic adventure. I knew the landscape well from being there many times but this time was magical. There were massive waterfalls everywhere rushing through the green spring foliage. We had to use our technical rope skills to safely cross rushing white water streams but everything was so beautiful and dangerous.

    I haven’t done it justice of course but it was just this perfect day where everything came together. I was young and healthy, I had my best partner with me, we had all of the right gear, the road being underwater meant we had the whole area to ourselves, and everything had been magically transformed into a waterfall adventure park for us to play.

    I’m still chasing that feeling of pure joy I had that day.





  • It’s a map of the surface of one part of the brain. Imagine a Star Trek scanning beam going across your head from right to left, about where your ears are. This is a picture of half of that part of the brain (the other part is a left/right mirror image of this picture).

    So the cells along the surface of the brain here are connected to the sensory nerves in your body and this is a map showing which body parts are where. So if you move to the top of the brain it is the area where you feel sensation from your abdomen. Go further down the side and you get to arms and then hands, then face. Notice that sensitive areas of your body are much bigger (hands, face) because a lot more brain tissue is devoted to those areas.




  • What I haven’t seen noted as much is that his imaginary dystopia seems to be, in large part, a pastiche assembled from past episodes of dysfunction. These episodes apparently became lodged in his brain, and perhaps because he’s someone who is not known for being interested in the details and who lives in a bubble of wealth and privilege, they never left.

    This is probably true but it’s also a matter of what events are making popular news. I (like others I suspect) was aware of Detroit’s struggles from news coverage. But I was unaware that Detroit apparently now is on the rebound until I read this article. That sort of thing hasn’t made national news coverage. So I’m not sure it’s as simple as “Trump is unmoored in time” though I think that is partially true. I can’t help but observe that these anachronistic points that Trump is bringing forth all serve his narrative so I believe that at least some of this is deliberate.